I don’t want AI in my online search. What options do I have?

Last week, Google announced a new artificial intelligence (AI) policy for schools that use Google apps. It provides new settings for opting in or out of AI products on student accounts. For schools that reject AI in the classroom entirely, they can also turn off search.

Speaking to The New York Times, Google’s vice president for education, Chris Phillips, noted that “search and AI are deeply integrated”. This led to headlines claiming there’s no longer a way to use Google search without AI.

Since AI has become ubiquitous, it’s also facing increasing pushback. Some people may reject it due to personal, ethical, or environmental reasons.

But we all need to look things up on the internet. So is it actually possible to search the web “without AI”? To answer that question, we need to unpack a few things first.

How does a web search engine work?

Google search is a tool known as a web search engine. For you to type in a query and receive results milliseconds later, a bunch of things need to happen under the hood. All of them involve algorithms – simply put, a set of instructions for a computer.

There are six main components of a web search engine:

• crawling: harvesting documents published on the web
• indexing: breaking down documents into efficient data structures
• spam detection: filtering out content that doesn’t offer genuine value to users
• ranking: ordering search results by how relevant they might be to the query
• user interactions: assisting users when they formulate their information needs (for instance, auto-completing your query) or consume the search output (such as serving you snippets or AI summaries)
• evaluation: measuring if search quality improves after making a change in one of the above components.

These features are not static – developers, engineers and informational retrieval researchers are constantly tinkering and improving them.

How does web search use AI?

To answer this question, we first need to define what kind of AI we’re talking about.

All of the components listed above are likely to involve some sort of machine learning and neural networks – that is, AI systems trained to analyse lots of data, learn patterns and make predictions. So, there’s actually no way to use a search engine “without AI”.

But when people talk about AI these days, they tend to mean generative AI. These are AI systems trained on enormous amounts of data and capable of generating new content from prompts.

A version of this, called retrieval-augmented generation, is what allows you to have a conversation with a search engine. It combines a large language model for the generative part, and the web content retrieved by the search engine.

This is the technology behind Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews. They provide handy summaries and a new way to interact with content on the web, but they’re not without issues.

The large language model is built on an astonishing amount of training data, but it’s not updated as frequently as the web search index. Links in AI summaries are associated with the answer after generating it, and this component can also make mistakes.

In addition, searchers who see AI Overviews are accessing fewer sources overall. Overreliance on AI is also a well-known phenomenon in which users may trust an answer without verifying whether it’s correct.

So can I search the web without AI summaries?

Commercial web search engines like Google are increasingly showing AI summaries to users’ queries. At the time of writing this, there’s no official switch that lets Google users disable AI Overviews and other generative AI features.

But there’s one little hack that works: if you append “&udm=14” to the search request link, the Google search results default to the “Web” tab that doesn’t show AI Overviews and other snippets.

For this to work, you’d have to manually add that parameter in the address bar. That’s not always practical, so people have built browser plugins and ways to automate this step.

In Mozilla Firefox and Chromium browsers such as Brave, Chrome and Opera for desktop devices, you can set up a custom search engine to add this parameter every time you hit search on Google.

But Google search isn’t the only search engine available. There are many others out there, such as DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, or Ecosia. These provide a “non-AI mode” that deactivates AI summaries by default, and in some cases even provides the option to filter out AI-generated images.

Where do those search engine results come from?

Maintaining a web index is not easy. The web is constantly changing, and keeping the big volume of searchable information fresh requires enormous computational resources.

There are only a few organisations able to maintain this at a large scale. Google’s and Microsoft Bing’s indexes are the most popular worldwide. But there are some alternatives that are gaining attention.

Brave Search operates from an independent search engine. DuckDuckGo combines multiple sources, including content harvested with its own crawler, and search results sourced from Bing.

Initiatives such as the OpenWebSearch.eu project aim to develop an independent open European infrastructure for web search. It also makes a web index publicly available so others can build their own web search engine.

So, is there a search without AI?

The short answer is “no”. All search engines use AI in one form or another.

What about generative AI specifically?

It is technically possible to disable AI-generated answers from the search results page. Some search engine providers have decided to provide that option to users, while others – like Google – have made it a default.

Damiano Spina has received funding from the Australian Research Council. He is an Associate Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), a Member of the Australian Internet Observatory, and a Member of the Association for Computing Machinery.